Cities beat London house price rise

Average property values in the capital have leapt by nearly £57,000 over the last year

House prices in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Southampton, Bristol and Birmingham have grown at a faster rate than those in London in recent months, property analyst Hometrack has reported.

London property prices increased by 0.5% in the three months to November, slowing from average quarterly increases of 1.4% seen in the capital over the last year.

Despite the recent cooldown in the London market, average property values in the capital have leapt by nearly £57,000 over the last year, which the report said is almost twice the UK's average income.

Prices have increased in London at the same rate over the last quarter as they have in Manchester, Portsmouth and Belfast, which also recorded 0.5% growth.

Property values in Edinburgh have seen the biggest upswing over the last three months out of the 20 cities monitored by Hometrack, with prices increasing by 1.8% over the period to reach £196,900 on average.

House prices in Glasgow and Southampton have both seen quarterly increases of 0.9% to reach £110,300 and £192,300 on average respectively.

Meanwhile, property values in Bristol and Birmingham both recorded a 0.6% uplift in the three months to November.

Homes in Bristol are now worth £218,600 typically, having become £26,600 more expensive over the last year, while those in Birmingham have an average value of £134,300, marking a year-on-year increase of £8,200, according to the report.

Liverpool has recorded the smallest increase in property values over the last year, with a rise of just over £3,000, taking the average house price there to £107,000.

London property prices now stand at £403,200 typically. Compared with the previous peak of the market in 2007, London, Cambridge and Oxford have seen the biggest uplifts, with house prices in these cities now sitting at 30.5%, 28.7% and 21.9% above their pre-financial crisis highs respectively.

A typical buyer in Cambridge faces paying £40,000 more for a property than they did a year ago while one in Oxford would need to spend £31,600 more than they would have done in November 2013.

But Hometrack said that those markets which have seen the strongest price growth are also now starting to see the clearest signs of a slowdown.

Richard Donnell, research director at Hometrack, said the slowdown in London will act as a drag on the rate of house price growth across the UK over the next year.

He said: "The rate of growth in house prices is starting to lose momentum across other cities in southern England while across the rest of the country modest levels of house price appreciation continue as prices rise off a low base."

Mr Donnell said that, overall, he expects property values to increase at a rate which is more in line with earnings growth next year, with a 2% house price increase pencilled in for the whole of 2015 across the UK.

He said that stricter mortgage lending rules which came into force in April and force mortgage applicants to produce stronger evidence about their spending habits in order to make sure they truly can afford their repayments are having an impact on the pace of house price increases.

Mr Donnell said that a fifth of London postcodes have registered price falls in the last three months.

He continued: "We would expect to see further, modest price falls in the months ahead as prices re-align off a high base to what buyers are prepared to pay."

Here are the average house prices in each city monitored by Hometrack in November and the percentage and cash increase seen over the last year: